Dean Koontz Fears Nothing / Memories of abuse feed his scary novels

Jerry Carroll, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Monday, February 23, 1998

It's not hard to see where novelist Dean Koontz gets what he puts into his scary books. The brooding sense of evil that hangs over his fiction is piped in from a childhood spent as son of the town drunk, a violent sociopath who beat him regularly and later in life came at him twice with a knife.

"I've been writing about it in one way or another all my life," he said in an interview.

A small, tidy man in jeans and black cashmere jacket and turtleneck, he came through town the other day to promote his latest best- seller, "Fear Nothing."

The title also describes a personal philosophy. "I learned from my mother that you can never let anything scare you." When his father went into his furniture-smashing rages, his tiny, frail mother stepped forward to intercede physically if it was necessary to protect her son. "He was a large, stocky person, but she could terrify him at certain times, even in his worst moments." Those were frequent. "He was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic with tendencies of violence. He drank a fifth a day all his life, which made things worse. Later, he was diagnosed as sociopathic, which put a lot of things into perspective. Sociopaths fake emotion. They don't really feel the emotions ordinary people feel, and they don't believe that others do, either. They believe everyone is faking.

"Living under the thumb of someone like that is a pretty strange existence. He was very violent, always in trouble with the police. He held 44 jobs in 34 years. He punched out the boss and was fired."

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Money was scarce as a result. "We lived in a small place my grandfather built. After he died, we never knew from day to day whether there'd be a roof over our head. I could never understand why my mother stayed with him. But nobody divorced then, or it was very rare. She just accepted things."

His father was put in a psychiatric ward many years later after his sec-- ond attempt to stab Koontz. "I got (the weapon) away from him, but it was a close thing."

As with many who write, that unhappy childhood was the catalyst for Koontz, 53. "I think it drives you to get control of your life. Writing is about structuring the story and controlling the language. I know a surprising number of writers who had one or two alcoholic parents."

He taught English and wrote fiction at night until his wife of 31 years, Gerda, proposed supporting him for five years to see if he could make it. "She knew how obsessive- compulsive I am." It took a dozen years before his first best-seller. Since then, Koontz has had 35 novels published, with sales of 200 million.

"I start working at 7:30 in the morning and work until dinner without a break for lunch. I work six days a week and toward the end go into seven-day drive. It sounds grueling, but it isn't. The real world fades for me, and the world in the story becomes more real. I've been known to finish a book one day and start a new one the next."

This kind of haste has its costs. His new novel has a character who in a single night sees his father die in a hospital bed, witnesses the body being switched in a basement, is chased by mysterious men at a mortuary, uncovers a police conspiracy, is in a house where a murder occurs and barely escapes when it is burned down, is chased by a band of strange monkeys, discovers there is something strange about his dog, makes love with his girlfriend, kills a man, realizes a vast and horrible scientific experiment has taken place that will change the world and . . . well, a lot of other stuff happens, too.

THE PUBLISHING HUSTLE

Koontz has a new agent, Robert Gottlieb, and a new publisher, Bantam. "I always thought of publishing as a genteel sort of business, and everyone you met in it would be very forthcoming, very honest with you. But it's not very different from the motion picture business. It's very much a hustling business. I had a lot of problems with that over most of my career in one place or another until I finally found an agent who has spoken honestly to me. He never promised me anything he couldn't achieve, and he's always been after my best interests."

Koontz has always resented the horror category publishers have tried to push him into for marketing reasons. "Most horror is very misanthropic, and I think I'm not. I don't write about vampires or werewolves, and I don't write about haunted houses, so I never felt the label applies. There is scariness and suspense in my books, but there are also a lot of humor and love stories."

PRESSURE TO REPEAT YOURSELF

"What publishers most like is once you've done a book that succeeds, they want you to write that very same book the next time," he continued. "There's tremendous pressure to keep repeating yourself. It's just too awful and boring to contemplate sitting in a room doing that."

He said he has also been pressured to dumb down his fiction to sell better. "The less I write down to the reader, the better I sell. I've always been told to take the big words out of my books. All this has made me very cynical about publishing wisdom."

Koontz said his work is uplifting. "My books are really about hope and friendship and triumphing over substantial odds." This is in keeping with his philosophy. "It sounds so New Age or so shallow, but it's true: You can choose to be happy. As a kid, I made that choice. I wasn't going to let things suck me down."

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The second time he disarmed his father, the police arrived to find Koontz holding the knife he'd taken from him. "They drew their guns and said, 'Drop the knife!' " After a brief argument that he gave up when he realized he was in danger of being shot, Koontz lay down on the floor with arms stretched out. He smiles now in recollection.

"Everything in life is material. Sooner or later almost all of it is amusing. I think of it as a parade of fools, and I'm right up front with a baton."

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